Then came jump 3203.
It was my 9th tandem in 2 days, and when I tried to do my control check after opening the right toggle wouldn't release. I let go of the left toggle to yank on the right with both arms but it was locked solid. I briefly considered landing on rear risers until I looked down at the 65 year old out of shape woman strapped to my chest before coming to the inevitable conclusion that finally, after 22 years and 3202 jumps, I was finally going to have my first reserve ride.
"Jane! Resume the free fall position!" She quickly crossed her arms on her chest, hauled her legs up between mine, and put her head back on my shoulder. She was ready long before I was.
Every single time I had rehearsed a cutaway on the ground I looked down, found both handles, then smoothly pulled the cutaway handle to release the main, followed by immediately pulling the reserve handle to deploy the reserve.
The plan went to hell when I looked down. The handles weren't where they had been every other time I'd run through the sequence. In fact, after a brief and increasingly panicked search they appeared to have vanished altogether. I had a flashback to the very first tandem I ever did in 2006 with Ross Redman strapped to my chest, same thing, no handles. Anywhere. In desperation I grabbed the main lift webbing and followed it up, and up, and up, and up, finally finding the cutaway pillow perfectly angled to be hidden behind the webbing well above my head, because we were hanging the harness, rather than having it hanging from me like it was all the other times I'd rehearsed.
Finally! I released the left toggle which I'd been holding down to keep us from going into a spiral, pulling firmly on the cutaway, then more firmly, and as we began to spin around in a circle started to jerk it desperately with, of all things, Christine Fouchards voice singing in my head:
"You picked a fine time to fail me reserve....
400 feet and I'm losing my nerve...
I've seen some bad ones,
Lived through some sad ones,
But this one, I just don't deserve,
You picked a fine time, to fail me reserve.
Just as I came to the conclusion that we were done, this was it, we were about to get a planet stuffed up our ass (which would hurt - twice), Christine's voice shifted to "PEEL PULL!" I peeled, I pulled, the pillow came free, and almost instantly we were under a gorgeous bright orange reserve.
At the time it seemed to have taken forever to work through the problem and get under the reserve, later when I checked my ProTrack I was surprised to see that our second free fall ended at 3200 feet.
I reached forward with the cutaway handle and shouted to Jane "Here! Hold This!" Which she did, and the rest of the flight down to the ground was pretty normal except for all my giggling.
Which is when the real fun started. Mile High is located just across the Trans Canada Highway from the bustling town of Arnprior. Depending on winds it's not at all unusual to use the Prior Sports Bar or Tim Hortons as the spot to leave the aircraft, that's how close the town is. On Sunday the wind was blowing straight into town, which carried my discarded main parachute across the highway to deposit it in someones back yard.
Which is when the phone calls to various emergency services began. Police, fire, ambulance, the airport manager, the drop zone itself. The slowly tumbling main parachute couldn't possibly be anything but some poor bugger crashing to his death, screaming all the way, with "You picked a fine time to fail me reserve" the last thing he'd ever hear.
Which is how it came about that the guy who runs the local paper was asked 4 days later "So did the guy who landed in town on Sunday Die?"
Which led to the newspaper guy calling Trevor, and when Trevor explained what really happened, he said "yeah I get this sort of thing all the time from farmers who are having their annual brush fire and the fire trucks show up after somebody panic cell phone calls only to find a nicely controlled pile of branches"...
For the record, rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. The only difference is that this time it wasn't me who was doing the exaggerating.
And I owe Amanda a bottle of her favorite party beverage for saving our lives. There goes my perfect record.
